First drafts and another reason to love Mark Twain

Since I work from home, I have a number of little traditions. One is Friday night drinks. I finish work early and open a bottle of wine for a celebratory glass. Another tradition is the occasional play-date. Sometimes I get caught up in word count and to-do lists and need a day to be a little kid again. I put all the couch cushions on the floor, grab a couple of blankets, some sheets of card and paper, coloured crayons and some books - I highly recommend SARK's Creative Companion. I eat my meals on the floor too (floor picnic!). In fact, I spend the whole day there. I draw mind-maps, doodle pictures of my characters, write out what I'm thinking in cartoon letters and decorate it with squiggles. It's a great way to get out of your reasonable, methodical adult brain and into your more child-like, creative one, and it usually produces some interesting stuff for your aforesaid adult brain to work with on the following day. I did this last week, and it made me feel much freer and more open for the next few days.

Thank you so much for all your comments, as always - I'm approaching the end of the first draft, and will hopefully be celebrating next week! All writers work differently, but for me the function of a first draft can be summed up in this quote from Mark Twain:

“The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is that you really want to say.”

I get the book to a point where it is readable, coherent and complete. For now. I print it out. I take a break from it for a while in an attempt to get some distance from the material (and that's how I see it: as raw material). The book is lulled into a false sense of security. It dozes in a bottom drawer, imagining that its ordeal is over. Oh, the innocence! Poor little thing. As soon as I feel I can approach it objectively, I break it into little bits and reassemble it. Characters die. Scenes, even whole chapters, are destroyed or dramatically re-shaped. The beginning becomes the middle which becomes the beginning or the end or gets thrown out altogether. It's a massacre. Then there's the fiddly task of making sure that I haven't changed someone's name halfway through (I do this a lot), checking dates (important, since this novel is set in the Second Chimurenga in the 1970s) and that sort of thing. I also do a search-and-destroy to eliminate my frequent offenders - words and phrases I tend to over-use. I cut a lot of text, too, as I tend to write too much material and trim it down rather than writing too little and fleshing it out. Again, every writer is different, but this works for me.

I also do a lot of writing about the book at this point. I return to my original themes to see if they still apply and whether others have appeared along the way. I write a new synopsis. I write a story arc for each character (even though I am usually sick of the sight of them at this point).

Once I have finished with all of this, I have a battered and bleeding manuscript covered in blue pen. I sit down and work through it page by page, ticking off the changes as I go and throwing away pages as I finish them. This takes a long time. With my last book, I got through this by waking up at 5am and working before the sun came up, to minimise distractions. It is a painful but immensely satisfying process. And, at the end of it, I should have something approaching a decent book that I can pass on to my agent with some degree of confidence. With this book, I hope to have this done by the end of December.

Here are a few detailed posts on revision that I wrote while in the thick of rewriting my previous novel:
1) The original epiphany
2) Books are Not Babies
3) Souffles

And in the past I have found these two articles very helpful with the revision process:
1) Nathan Bransford's Revision Checklist
2) Holly Lisle's One-pass Manuscript Revision